


Redolence of Memory

by Phrenotobe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Vampire, F/F, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Rainbow Drinkers, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/pseuds/Phrenotobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It took you a long time,” Kanaya says.<br/>Terezi dusts soil from her hair, removing her gloves.<br/>“I have no eyes,” she replies, “And delicate, tiny hands.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redolence of Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nago/gifts).



It’s the winter of 1897, and the air is chilly, humid with fog and edging into frost. The lamp light is all but defunct in the gloom, and Ms Pyrope, who lives at number 413 by Hyde park, is taking her usual evening walk. The weather does not bother Terezi Pyrope, as she has a tendency to run cold-blooded; The humidity brings no sadness either, and as for the fog, well.  
This Lawyer sees no fog.  
Every evening is a new olfactory experience, the scents by which she finds her way changing through the seasons from timid spring to glorious floral summer all through the rotting leaves of autumn to the sharp icy bite of frost at her nose. Her stick taps like a metronome against the pavement, each step confident and unhurried. She pauses, as is customary at the crossing, listening for traffic passing before her journey is scheduled to continue. 

However, today her journey is interrupted.  
A new scent appears, a perfume-and-damask wrapped curio that stands much taller than she does. It hovers in the shadow of an alleyway just by where the butcher’s stall stands during the day, a ripe bouquet that persists lightly after he’s packed up for the day and rolled it home. 

“May I help you?” Terezi says grandly, doffing her hat and turning toward the scent.  
“Um,” the scent says, “Perhaps.”  
Terezi’s walking stick clacks impatiently against the flagstones.  
“Out with it,” she commands, “I have more than you to pay my attention to tonight!”  
The scent detaches from the wall, revealing in the savory haze of london fog two orange horns of pleasing and equal length, above a face that wouldn’t be clarified without an ungenteel pap or two to define the corners and such.  
“Well,” she says, “I have need of your help. You are Terezi Pyrope, aren’t you?”

Terezi laughs aloud, throwing her head back in genial amusement. She places her hat back upon her horns neatly, leaving the grin upon her face.  
“A precious tale!” she says, “I am, and also have a fee for such inopportune things as these.”  
She pats a pocket, propping herself up on her stick.  
“Caegars make the world go around. Introduce yourself, before I walk on.”  
“I have some beetles put aside,” the solicitor mumbles, “My name is Miss Maryam. This issue is very delicate, could we take this to my home?”  
Terezi dips her head sagely, offering a hand. Miss Maryam takes it, her skin a little colder than Terezi expected through the lace and satin of her gloves. 

Once at Miss Maryam’s rooms, which are small but charming, like a knick-knack from the seaside, she prepares some hot tea on the stove. Terezi sniffs just a little, reading for her personal effects. A bookshelf full of books, incomprehensible liquorice spines with silver writing like drops of mercury, and then a decent chest of drawers covered by a doily under the window. A hairbrush and clippers lay on top of it with a patina of ground spice, and a shiny black typewriter sits neatly on a small table at the foot of the bed, a halfwritten document still in the carriage. She’s very deliberate in her movements as she moves about the room, her bootfalls only dulled by the carpet, and she offers the comfortable seat to her guest. 

she serves the beverage in a delicate cup, stewing it strong enough to be smelt from across the room. The metal bowl of a spoon chimes softly against cut glass as Miss Maryam reaches for sugar, getting it all together on a tray to bring over for the sightless lawyer.  
“Do you take milk?” She queries  
“I do,” Terezi answers, turning her head about to pick up more details of her surroundings and focusing on Miss Maryam’s shape, a tragic figure in mourning black against the oily yellow light from the windowpane. Spots of drizzle begins to tap against the glass with a reassuring clatter. The coverlet of the bed in the corner is a dark green, like stewed mint, and the walls are patterned cheerfully in dull grey with copper leaf to give it flashes of metallic brightness. The chair that Terezi sits upon, the best in the room, is comfortable though a little prone to lumps. While the place holds up at first, there’s something just a little strange on second notice. A piece of wallpaper near to the mantelpiece has been changed away for another pattern, creating a discrepancy by the fireback.

“You seem worried,” Terezi concludes, “Don’t you want any poured for yourself?”  
The teacup rattles on the saucer.  
“What?” the other troll says, “Oh. I don’t drink... tea.”  
Terezi nips at the fingertips of her gloves, tugging them off now she’s warmed through by the fire. It’s a little warmer than perhaps would be necessary, her clothes meant for out-of-doors more of a hinderance than a help.  
“Then perhaps I could lend you a hand,” she says, with a little snicker at her own joke, “You have been called to an unfair trial, and though the odds are against you, I do like a challenge.”  
She accepts the cup that is handed to her with a good-natured nod, bringing it to her lips and taking a deep gulp. Hot and fresh, it starts off bitter, warming her through and bringing up at the end with a dash of sweetness that leaves her feeling a little more genial at heart.  
“Thank you,” she purrs, “You are an excellent host.”  
She tugs at her collar, pulling her bow tie a touch more loose, and drains the cup before handing it back to her new client.  
“You’re welcome,” Miss Maryam says, placing it aside. She moves to sit down with a rustle of skirts, clearing her throat as she takes a seat on the wooden chair by the stove.  
“Forgive my forwardness,” Terezi says lazily, warm and comforted by the quite genial atmosphere of the room, “I can’t see your face. May I touch it?”  
The lady smoothes down her dress, pensive, and pulls her chair over to what she deems is a reasonably close distance.  
“I suppose it’s all right,” she says, “Though if you’re going to be that forward, you should probably call me Kanaya.”

Terezi hums agreement, raising her hands. She gives her cheek a little soothing pap with her palm before cupping her chin with a hand; drawing a line down Kanaya’s nose, she then traces out the arches of her brows. Terezi’s tongue curls behind her teeth, drawing in a deep breath to add color to the sketch that tactile touch brings, and tastes the bloom of verdant-hued lips, the spark and crackle of jade green iris over a yellowy-orange background. She is paler than expected, and still quite cold, but draws a breath in kind, leaning a little closer.  
“Tea would be good for you,” Terezi says. She pauses, her hand lifted mid-motion, feeling a tingle in her fingertips. Wiggling her fingers, she lets it fall to her lap.

“Are you alright?” Kanaya murmurs, reaching to grasp for Terezi’s hand. The touch brings with it an unimaginable feeling of needles and pins, a shock of static that shoots an ache through her arm and up through her elbow.  
“I don’t know,” Terezi says, flinching away, “I think I need to leave.”  
Kanaya moves forward to support her as she rises, unsteady on her feet. She tries to take a step but stumbles, caught in Kanaya’s dark-clad arms.  
“Excuse me,” she mumbles.  
Kanaya puts her back into the chair, gently but firmly, and pulls the tie from Terezi’s neck, pinching two buttons open with an experienced hand for good measure.  
“Can you breathe?” she asks, attentively kneeling by her seat.  
Terezi nods, touching her own neck to be sure and scrabbling at her collarbone with a hand, the other slack and useless as she starts to wheeze. Kanaya pops another button, spreading the starchy collar with two fingers, the heel of her hand resting against Terezi’s sternum.  
Terezi pulls in a lungful of air, everything in the room blooming into violent brightness. Kanaya’s face is a bleached surprise far too close for comfort with twin candle flames for eyes, seemingly glowing. She breathes in again, rawly croaking, the outlines of everything shuddering and filled with conflicting mixed-up hue.  
“I should be... soon,” Terezi manages, “Fine...”  
Kanaya shakes her head, the candle flames shapes of her eyes dancing in figure eights in Terezi’s senses. The rest of the room falls into dimness, Kanaya’s white fading to grey, candle flame to yellow motes shivering in and out of aromatic perception.  
“I don’t think you will be,” Terezi hears Miss Maryam say somewhere far away, “You’ve been poisoned.” 

Terezi Pyrope, of 413 Hyde Park, does not make it home that night. Instead she travels via her host’s arms to lay out flat on the mint leaf green bed in the corner. There, she spends her last feverish moments unable to fully comprehend the meaning of long and sharp teeth that rake open a pair of twin lines just below the line of her high collar.  
With barely-contained and fervent need, Kanaya slips out of her civilized seeming, brilliant white like a burning magnesium flame to the roots of her black hair. Terezi’s shirt collar is pulled ajar and held flat by those same fingertips that helpfully unbuttoned it, drips and drops of teal blue landing on the starched fabric from a ragged tear and chased with a tongue. The poison keeps her victim warm, lifting their temperature far above the norm for their place in the hemospectrum, and making their heart beat in a runaway cadence until the end of their life. 

Kanaya forces herself to a stop before she’s fully sated, and scratches her own fingertip, squeezing it to bring up a drop of jade green. Hesitating a moment, unsure of her decision, she puts it to Terezi’s lips shakily, adrenaline-filled and already turning cold against the buzzing heat of their feverish skin, and the troll’s tongue snatches it down to rest in their throat. 

Miss Maryam does a little bit of tidying up afterwards - washing out the cup, rinsing out the kettle, and putting the tea leaves in the compost. She closes the curtains, stokes up the fire, and folds Terezi’s arms neatly over her chest before rigor mortis arrives, then, as an afterthought, wipes her blood away with a cloth before it stains the covers indelibly. 

Terezi dies at four minutes past twelve, while Kanaya patiently waits with a book. She turns the page, scanning it while she darts glances at Terezi’s silent form, and lets the candle burn down, illuminating the page with her own ambient light.  
At half past twelve, Kanaya reaches for Terezi’s discarded cane to prop it up neatly against the wall. She notes the draconic handle and finds it fitting, as _Dracula_ has been on her shelf since May. She glances over at the clock again at ten to one, shutting her book and putting it neatly back on the shelf before going downstairs to ask a brownblood to buy some more candles with a handful of change and to bring them up before returning to her vigil in the chair. 

At one in the morning, the brownblood return up the stairs with the candles, apologizing for taking their time. Kanaya brushes off the idea and locks the door behind them. They comment on Kanaya’s new friend, sleeping away their fever with their shoes on, and Kanaya offers them something to drink.

At five past one, Terezi’s senses begin to return, the room sliding back into hue with a sudden bloom of scent as she takes a new breath. The blue-copper tang of drying blood is an almost tangible streak in the air around her, maddeningly tantalizing like the scent of hot dinner drifting from a kitchen. 

The room feels unfamiliar - is indeed unfamiliar, the introduction in the alley a general fog, the walk and civilized tea an unappetizing blot that tastes sour in the mouth. The quiet conversation hums like a nest of bees, incomprehensible and uncomfortable to the aural sponges. The brownblood stands up to check on her, a neat gray coat with a chocolate-wiff dab on the breast pocket, their hands warm and calloused abrasively as they reach to touch her wrist and check her pulse. 

Terezi twitches at that, forgetting the natural flow of breathing and out, and the colors around her fade into obscurity. Left behind is something new in the blackness, a sketchy sense of where and what, organized by warmth instead of scent.  
The brownblood beside her is the most noticeable thing, muttering with concern. Terezi assigns cherry red to the feeling, holding the thought until it sticks and ignoring their drab patter as they manhandle her other sleeve to look for a beating heart, getting louder and less tolerable as they go. Behind them, the fire is a locus of comforting orange that reaches out to the room, the kettle on the stove a dull olive green as the metal cools.  
Her host and murderer stands at the foot of the bed, a faded green center that disperses to blue-black, their extremities hard to discern among the ambient temperature and blending into the objects that their hands touch.  
“Be careful,” Miss Maryam warns her second guest, though she does not explain why.  
She does not need to.

The brownblood’s broiling fingers reach for her collar, pulling it back and bringing forth a half-memory of scratches that felt like ice and fire meeting over her skin. Terezi’s eyelids snap open, her hands reaching in kind for their throat too, pushing both thumbs into the soft, unarmoured tissues and dragging them down toward her mouth.  
The scent of blood and murder rises as she opens her mouth for an instinctive bite, clamping down hard as they struggle frantically to shove her away. Bearing down still harder, she twists to press them into the coverlet, holding them down with her weight and continuing to put pressure on their windpipe, her hand clamped at their nape. Blood wells and she shakes her head, tearing their throat open wide to expose the vivid colors of their insides. Terezi’s mouth opens wide as she pulls in the scent, sweet and wet and raw together at once. Their grip grows feeble, bapping at her shoulders and forehead, sliding off the waxed surface of her linear horns as her tongue rasps against the open edges of their wound.  
At the foot of the bed, Kanaya waits, attentively calm. 

The blood tastes bitter at first, forced down through mechanical means, but the second gulp is filling. Hot and soothing Terezi’s nerves through the mental static, she seals her mouth around the wound and groans at the taste, the brownblood’s body twitching before going limp at last. The warmth that fills her lasts until the last, sweet drop, sugary and cloying, and she tries to bring up more, biting at their ragged flesh but finding little succor.

Terezi sniffs, pulling up colors and scents around her, the brownblood on the bed a pool of now-noxious chocolate aromas and broken angles. Her hands are white - too white, gleaming and vibrant and dead. She stares at Kanaya, patiently observing in similar radiance, and springs backwards from the bed to land on the floor, shuffling up quickly to press against the wall and grasping for her cane. It slips in her hands, dropping to the floor with a clack, and she turns ruby-bright eyes on Kanaya, glowing from within.  
“I did that,” she says hoarsely, touching a hand to her blood-soaked cravat.  
“Yes, you did,” Kanaya says calmly.  
“And what now?”  
Kanaya turns her head to look at the window, rain still drumming against the pane.  
“We throw it into the river.” 

A week afterwards, Terezi is buried in the grand graveyard reserved for people of note; a good person who could have gone on to greater things. Her obituary is complimentary and pleasingly of length, and her death’s mysterious circumstances are commented upon in several letters in the next publication. She gets into the papers twice, for six pages - three are an effusive digest of her life, and the other half a scandalous shock-horror exclusive on her first kill. 

She is put in the ground on a grey morning in a plain wooden casket, the crowd perhaps a little anxious to catch a glimpse of her in a most ghoulish manner. Conspicuous by the grave marker, a tall woman in mourning clothes watches the affair in a veil, staying until every last attendee has gone. The gravediggers, if they note her presence, do not mention it. They leave their work finished at some time after two, the turf re-laid neatly in strips.  
The mourner leaves the grave while the day is still light, and returns as the sun begins to set, pulling up the turf and rolling it up neatly before reinstating her vigil. 

At eleven P.M, Terezi’s hand finally appears above the heavy soil, clothed in a white silk glove now stained through and through with the dark soil, teal blood at her knuckles and fingertips. Kanaya catches it in hers, giving it a good tug to pull her further out, and helps her onto the grass beside her resting place.  
“It took you a long time,” Kanaya says.  
Terezi dusts soil from her hair, removing her gloves.  
“I have no eyes,” she replies, “And delicate, tiny hands.”  
Kanaya laughs, standing up to take a roll of turf and lay it back over Terezi’s grave.  
“You must be hungry.”  
Terezi stands, breathing in the cold to see her surroundings with an invisible exhale.  
“Yes.”

Another two weeks after that, on a thundering night at the eve of advent, Vriska receives a letter. She withdraws from the social gathering, noting the return address with sullen worry, and locks herself into the study.

_To Vriska, my light -_  
_I couldn’t go through with our engagement to be married. Don’t look for me, as I will be dead by the time this reaches you. I hope my funeral was satisfying and that you have had plenty of flowers delivered for your sadness. I know you aren’t patient, but you could try it! Maybe one day we shall see each other again on the same side._

Vriska balls up the note, hefting it with admirable athleticism toward the window, hitting the curtain and bouncing down to the floor.  
“This isn’t even her own writing! Is she trying to make a fool out of me?”  
She kicks the writing-desk, scuffing the dark wood, and sourly watches the dipping pen roll underneath to stain the carpet with a wide blue splotch.  
“This is a cluckbeast’s lies,” she seethes, “and I don’t believe it one bit!”  
The curtain draws aside with a velvet rustle, lifted from underneath by a pale green hand in mourning clothes. Tucked into Kanaya’s side under the arc of her arm, Terezi stands, both hands on her cane. Her clothes are in mourning black, the inverse to how she was buried, a dashing collar ablaze with red around her neck and a matching flower at her buttonhole, stylishly illegal and backlit by the lightening storm. A teal cravat tops it off, a moody blue that reveals true electric color with every bright strike.  
Kanaya motions silently for Terezi to advance with a gentle, glowing hand on her shoulder.  
“It is not completely true,” she says, grinning as she ambles confidently forward, her own bioluminescence flickering on as she steps out of her sire’s shadow, “But thanks to the invitation from your maid, we are now both here on the same side.”


End file.
